TU1209 - Transport Equity Analysis: assessment and integration of equity criteria in transportation planning (TEA)

Understanding the equity implications of transport policies and investments is becoming increasingly important, as underscored by social movements around the world. This poses a major challenge in the assessment and appraisal of transport projects and policies, in which equity issues are currently hardly addressed. In fact, current evaluation methods in transport do not account for equity issues, and this topic is not dealt with in EU guidebooks for project evaluation. Only Germany, as an exception, considers equity between regions (Läender), but not in terms of accessibility to key life activities within an urban region. This Action proposal contributes to the body of research by bringing together new approaches to incorporate equity consideration in transport project evaluation and decision making. The approaches consist of the measurement of accessibility with the literature on social justice, travel behaviour models and socio-economic impacts analysis in line with mainstream welfare economics.

The three main objectives of this Action proposal are:

1) to establish a methodology to explore the links between transport accessibility and distributional factors;

2) to develop new transport evaluation criteria accounting for accessibility in the social welfare function;

3) to help embed equity assessment into future transport policies and investments.